Passport Chief Fired in Wake of Records Search

President Bush, responding Tuesday to a controversial search of the passport records of Bill Clinton and Ross Perot, fired the assistant secretary of state in charge of the passport office.

A spokesman for President-elect Clinton accused the defeated President of widespread abuse of government power during the election campaign and said the incoming Administration will not allow the matter to end with the dismissal of Elizabeth M. Tamposi, chief of the State Department’s consular bureau.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the reasons for Tamposi’s dismissal will become clear within a few days, although the infraction appears to involve improper political use of her office.

State Department Inspector General Sherman Funk is completing his investigation into the search of the passport files of Clinton and his mother, Virginia Kelley, and Perot. Boucher said the report will be made public “in its entirety.”

In a written statement issued by her lawyer, Tamposi said: “I took no action that I deemed wrong or inappropriate.”

Boucher said acting Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger recommended Tamposi’s dismissal during a telephone conversation with Bush Tuesday morning. The recommendation appeared inspired in part by a Washington Post story published Tuesday that three senior State Department officials from the consular bureau combed through Perot’s file at the government’s warehouse for inactive records in suburban Maryland on Oct. 13.

According to a memo obtained by the newspaper, one of Tamposi’s assistants removed an application and two letters from Perot’s company that were loose in the files. The memo did not explain what the company letters were about or why they were in Perot’s files. The memo, written on Oct. 26, did not indicate that the search of Perot’s files was conducted in response to any request under the Freedom of Information Act, the newspaper said.

The search of the Clinton and Kelley files, conducted two weeks earlier, became public knowledge last month. Clinton’s passport files garnered interest after reports that he had tried to renounce his U.S. citizenship to avoid service in the Vietnam War--allegations that were determined to be unfounded.

Boucher said that Funk’s office knew of the Perot search before the newspaper account appeared, indicating the decision to oust Tamposi immediately was in response to the revelation of the incident rather than the incident itself.

Although Funk’s office said the investigation is not yet complete, Boucher said that Eagleburger “has been kept informed all along the way of the progress of the investigation, so he knows sort of where it stands.”

In Little Rock, Ark., Clinton spokesman George Stephanopoulos, snapped, “It’s about time,” when asked about Tamposi’s dismissal.

“There was a lot of abuse of power during this election,” Stephanopoulos told reporters. He said Clinton and his advisers will watch closely as an internal government investigation proceeds to see whether Bush Administration officials other than Tamposi had knowledge of the search.

“I think we need to know who else knew,” Stephanopoulos said.

Referring to Tamposi, a New Hampshire Republican activist and a longtime associate of former White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu, Stephanopoulos said: “Clearly, she was a political appointee, and she was working in an atmosphere where she felt that this was OK.”

He also said that the Administration had “crossed the line” in assigning high-level Treasury Department officials to examine and prepare critiques of Clinton’s tax proposals while working on government time.

Stephanopoulos expressed renewed concern that government statistics issued shortly before the election might have exaggerated the rate of economic growth. But he said the Clinton camp has no evidence that the surprisingly high growth rate of 2.7% in the third-quarter gross domestic product, which was reported in early November, reflected “something unwarranted” on the part of the Administration.

The comments indicated the Clinton campaign remains bitter about Bush’s tactics as he sought reelection and is unlikely to allow the passport case to fade away.

A report by the staff of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said last month that four senior State Department officials spent more than 10 hours over two days combing through the records of Clinton and his mother. Quoting employees of the records center, the report said the State Department officials complained they were unable to find the correspondence they were seeking.

The department maintains the searches were in response to requests from news organizations under the Freedom of Information Act. However, the searches went far beyond the usual response to such requests.

In her statement, Tamposi said: “I did not approve, encourage or condone any review of passport records other than those specifically identified in the FOIA requests.”

Tamposi has told close associates that she neither received instructions nor gave instructions about the passport search, although she told her superiors that it was going on.

Kempster reported from Washington and Jehl reported from Little Rock. Times staff writer Robert L. Jackson in Washington contributed to this story.